There's Your Moral
by Punkin09
Summary: He was twelve. It was January. Dean handed him a shotgun.


"…_**in times of storm, we mustn't allow the storm to enter ourselves; rather, we have to find peace inside ourselves and then breathe it out."**_

_** \- Lawrence Weschler**_

**Set anytime post 8x13**

Sam stopped asking for things a long time ago.

Most things he never had to ask for, or even think about, because Dean was just _there_. Giving, tearing off pieces of himself for Sam without a second thought. His brother will always do that. Sam will never have to ask for that, even when he doesn't want it, even when he wants to ask Dean not to do that.

He was eight. Dean was divvying up the peanut butter carefully—calculating, critical green irises. Sam realized he was making it last. His brother claimed the sad, unappetizing ends of the loaf in order to bequeath Sam the remaining two pieces of sugary, white Wonder Bread. Because Sam didn't like the crusts. Dean didn't either. That didn't appear to matter. No words had been spoken. Sam watched, sick to his stomach, because he hadn't asked for that, but he seemed to have asked nonetheless.

He couldn't ask for more, couldn't possibly. If Sam asked for more, that would be asking too much. So he stopped asking for anything. Each day, his brother's gaze tracked Sam as he pulled further and further away. The distance, the ravine he forced between them, would stipulate Sam couldn't accidentally ask for more than Dean could give. He could focus wholly on that which only he could give himself, for if Sam only asked things of himself then there was no fear of ever being denied, of ever taking from someone else, of ever depriving his brother. There was an elusive pressure, suffocating him, crushing him, stealing his sleep and invading his dreams. For every corporeal monster, there were ten more illusory ones in the outer fringes of Sam's vision. The anxiety of tamping it down, of swallowing it as effortlessly as his brother and father managed to, was enough to shake Sam to his bones.

Dean extended his arms across the chasm so readily, so steadily—offering Sam something like the action was expected. Sam didn't ask, always didn't ask. The worst part is the acceptance, the relief, because he may not have asked, but...he wanted to.

And those are the sins he started tallying—since peanut butter, and bread, and crusts. For four years, he could only encapsulate those inexplicably devastating epiphanies as those tally marks—disgraceful crosshatches etched into the recesses of his soul. Then, his palms grew to understand the weight of a weapon. His tongue grew to understand the peculiar flow of Latin. His skin grew to understand the sticky hunger of blood.

He was twelve. It was January. Dean handed him a shotgun.

* * *

"_Target practice, Sammy." The bleached, Midwest horizon frames his older brother's head in a brilliant halo. Sam blinks up at him. He always feels shorter, smaller in some way, in the morning. As if he's contiguous with a central truth._

_The decayed, brown leaves crunch beneath their crouched legs—autumnal sacrifices, necessary collateral damage. The harsh bark of a pine at their six. It smells of rot, and sap, and oil, and ice. Dean dragged him out of the scratchy, cosiness of the motel sheets like it was Christmas (like it was someone else's Christmas). The hike into the woods was ethereal—a journey into an alternate totality, where the sum of its parts cancelled out entropy. Sam had suspected he was dreaming until this instant._

_The twelve gauge props on his thighs. He's awkward. It doesn't feel natural. Dean doesn't look awkward. He grips his gun, pale knuckles, as if he were born of it. As if he came into the world, all white hat on a white horse, calling out the bad guys for a shoot-out in the streets. "What happened to beer bottles?" Sam grumbles. _

_Dean settles closer, folds up his limbs—a predator poised to strike. "Too stationary."_

_Sam bites on his bottom lip. The bare branches scatter above their heads—cracks in a ceiling on the verge of collapse. He wants to ask to do this another day. Maybe tomorrow._

_Sam doesn't ask for things._

"_But...it's not even deer season." His tone isn't fully what he hoped. He should sound more purposeful, he should sound as if he has a right to speak._

"_Who cares?" Dean scoffs. So simple. Sam watches his brother, all the time. Commits to memory every twitch, every response. If Sam can only mimic, if Sam can only transform or synthesize, maybe he can stop tallying. Dean is the most complicated simplicity Sam has ever encountered. He needs it and resents it. Sometimes it's akin to jealousy, but it's tough to be jealous of something that wouldn't quite fit if it was yours anyway._

"_It's illegal." The obvious argument._

"_Sam, everything we do is illegal." The even more obvious rebuff._

"_But…"_

"_Look, I know you don't want to kill Bambi's mom or whatever. But that's kinda the problem."_

_Pressure. _

_A thrum in the ear canal, a shallowness cramming against his ribcage. "So not wanting to kill animals is the problem?" Again, not the right tone. He seeks to challenge, not ask. Never ask._

_Dean knocks their elbows, gentle and direct—the unyielding certainty of the righteously correct. "No...not wanting to _kill _is the problem. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about."_

"_Dad put you up to this, didn't he?" He's admitting too much weakness. Laughable to hide that from Dean, regardless of effort. His brother sucks those aspects out of Sam like a professional vacuum. _

_Dean plows into the giant pockets of his coat. The bright, crumpled package of peanut M and M's glides free. Amazing, how his brother's insatiable appetite can ration when the occasion calls for it. He should allot himself more credit—there's the potential for self-restraint there, the potential for a less reckless having youth. He pops a few into his mouth. Sam cringes at the sound of teeth gnashing. Too heightened. Too much. _

"_Not everything is Dad's idea. Come on, this is fun, right? Like a mini stakeout."_

_Dean offers Sam the bag. Sam didn't ask. He might have been hungry before; he definitely isn't anymore. _

_Sam declines, nose wrinkled. "It's like ten degrees out here."_

_Dean shrugs, eats more candy. "Quit whining, Samantha."_

"_Jerk."_

"_Bitch."_

_Sam rolls his eyes, angles further away. Dean's unimpressed, refuses to get the memo, willfully oblivious. Bluntly, fuzzy, wool gloves plop into Sam's lap. "There, happy, princess? Told you to gear up before we left."_

_Sam stares at the gloves for an obscene amount of time, at his blue nail beds and the ridges of goosebumps. _

_Pressure. _

_A lump in his throat. Sam didn't ask._

_He puts the gloves on, unable to wring out a 'thank you'. Dean never accepts thanks. It's difficult not to offer. Tally marks, at least three already, and the sun hasn't even completely risen._

_Ultimately, only silence. Their breaths synchronized. Time loses definition. Sam can't decide what the desired outcome is. He knows what it should be, but he doesn't know if it's what feels right. That's what's twisted, wrong, misshapen. John says 'should be', and that's final. Dean says 'should be', and that's final. Why can't Sam treat it the same? The enemy becomes muddled when so much of what is destroying him leaks from within._

_Dean stiffens beside him. Wide, detecting emerald orbs. He's only sixteen. His freckles would de-age anyone else. But they're lethal on a Winchester._

"_Dean," Sam whispers._

"_Shhhh." Excitement, anticipation. "You hear that?"_

_Sam shakes his head, nerves aflame—circling vultures._

_Dean tilts his head, suggestive. "Listen."_

_Sam does listen. Good, and hard, and long. Silence, irrepressible silence. Uniquely solitary. The stuff of nightmares. "I don't hear anything." _

_Dean grins. Sam's opened a trap door of concealed, withheld intention. Hot breath—coffee and chocolate. Deadly. "Exactly."_

_Pressure, augmenting. The answer to something Sam didn't ask._

_Sam doesn't ask for things._

_A broad backed, white-tailed doe strides into view. It may as well be an apparition. It doesn't make a noise, hadn't made a noise. Dean knew it was there. Dean still heard it somehow, by not hearing it—the wicked sixth sense of a killer._

_His older brother nudges his side, nods encouragingly. Sam's paralyzed. The deer, so unsuspecting. Scrawny with the deprivation of winter, alive with the stubborn prevalence of nature._

"_You got this, Sammy."_

_Sam lines up the shotgun._

_He doesn't miss. It's fast, clean, as close to mercy and grace as murder can conceivably get. He learned from the best._

_Sam doesn't remember much after the reverberation, the recoil, and the thud of a warm body. Suddenly, they're standing over the bleeding mammal—glassy black pupils, protruding pink tongue. Their shadows dip and sway—thieving trespassers. Dean whistles, a tapering eulogy, and claps him on the back. "Nice shot, man!"_

_Nice shot._

_Dean declares it like he's giving Sam something._

_Sam didn't ask._

_Sam doesn't ask for things._

_The retraced walk to town is excruciatingly slow. Sam feels like he's drawing more and more executions inside with each inhale—a balloon expanding beyond its capabilities, enduring a purgatorial suffering._

_A word is plastered across the backside of his eyeballs: violence. _

_That's the pressure that has been crushing him for four years, the pressure epitomized in his tally marks. The anticipation, the evocation, and the actualization of violence. Inundating. Multiplied now, with Dean's "exactly"._

_Silence is inconsequential. The in-between is inconsequential. This moment, supposed triumph, is inconsequential. They could be shot dead in the next five minutes—random or not. Violence has no boundary. Sam can refuse to ask for anything for the rest of his life, and that won't hold any water._

_He thinks about school. He dares to think, for a brief second, about college. Dean's shoulder brushes his own. Sam studies his brother's satisfied smile from beneath the security of his bangs, studies his ease, how his sibling just slots and fits into his steps as if he belongs there. He can't ask Dean for that, would never ask for that. Dean can't give him that._

_Sam contemplates walking as if he belongs, about walking without this pressure. Maybe if he was someone different. Maybe if he was normal, and could ask for normal things. He considers that version of himself, considers where and how that version of himself could reliably exist. The image hovers, tenuous. Sam holds it in his mind's eye, clings to it, wears it like a shield._

* * *

A pile of dark, moist soil flings through the air and crumbles atop Sam's boots. Sam huffs, pauses digging. He's four feet deep into a grave—filthy, exhausted. Pure Louisiana humidity—immaculately sweltering and pristinely unwilling. The cloak of darkness provides no relief, offers no resistance.

"Dude, knock it off. I don't want to be out here all night," he hisses.

Dean's head pops up a couple meters to his right, a humanoid gopher, dirt smeared on his jaw. He grins, innocent of course, silver moonlight gleaming in the green, near opaque. "I'm not doing anything." There's very little his brother can't get away with. Dean knows it, Sam knows it, Dean knows Sam knows it.

"You dig your grave, I'll dig mine. All right?"

Dean grunts, not very convincing, and returns to work. Sam peers into the night. The Bell Plantation drips with gothic antebellum. The moment he saw it in William Bell's photographs, a chill seized his spine. For good reason. The estate is crawling with eight, extremely volatile, pissed of spirits—the last remnant of the doomed Bell family. Once the object of prestige and envy, now the subject of campfire tales and taboo infractions.

The abandoned, three story, greek revival mansion looms, superimposed with the mirage-like skyline—a silhouette of column teeth and convoluted porticos. To the East, the ominous and towering talons of the neglected hedge labyrinth. Dean's cracked a total of six jokes about _The Shining_, and they aren't even halfway finished.

"_Seriously, this place was asking for it."_

The EMF meters had gone haywire the instant they crossed the property line. Straightforward, uncomplicated. Sam understood from the get-go, didn't require the bells and whistles. He can intuit a ghost unerringly, blindly, with his legs cut off. There's a quality to his footsteps on haunted terrain—a fake lightness, a fake security. Like living in the molten core, beside the hearth, without having been properly invited. Like subsisting as a vagabond in another's permanent universe. Hallowed ground, now that's a separate story. Sam has no business there. He'll always be a stranger there. Consistency is the keystone of failure.

"Now who's slacking?" His brother's voice, close, shamelessly strident.

"At least one of us should pay some attention. Three people were gutted."

"I don't need to pay attention to pay attention."

A Dean Winchester gem. Sam could publish a book. He rolls his eyes, plunges the spear into the ground, and burrows deeper. "Let's wait to burn any bones until we dig everyone up."

Eight graves. A new record for one gig. Dean is insufferably thrilled.

"Scared of a little pushback, Sammy?"

"It's called being cautious."

"Whatever. I thought they bury above ground here anyway. For flooding."

Sam wipes the sheen of sweat from his forehead, chest heaving. They've been at it for a good while. This is a family cemetery, haphazard and unplanned. Mass tragedy is rarely planned, after all. Unless a roster of obsessed angels and demons are meddling. Eight graves, sure, but Sam had predicted they'd be shallow. He ought to realize by now that his predictions are paper-thin, breakable by design. "We're closer to Baton Rouge. Flooding's not as big of a concern, I guess. Plus, William buried everybody himself. Doubt he had time for tombs."

Sam straightens, his knees pop. Six feet. No casket, no bones. "Dean—".

"That guy was messed up. What kind of sicko takes photos and then—"

"Dean!"

"What?" Only the top half of his older brother's face is visible, eyebrows high, and not nearly enough healthy fear. Hauntings are old school fun for Dean. Basically _Scooby-Doo._

"Something's not right."

"Yeah, that's why we're here." Dean, always delaying, always tossing out the sarcasm like it's his God-given duty. Sam loves and hates it. _Time and place_, he used to snap at Dean. _Time and place_. Was never worth it, was never effective. Sam stopped eventually. Those rules don't apply to Dean.

"No, I mean, are you finding anything? How deep are you?" Pressure, on Sam's chest. Condensation of the mortal coil.

His brother dips out of sight. He's surpassed six feet, Sam can tell. "Shit."

The temperature plunges, the perspiration virtually freezes atop his skin. Sam springs out of the grave in a poisonous concoction of muscle memory, adrenaline, and practiced precision. He snatches up the sawed-off and obliterates the manifesting spirit in an explosion of rock salt before it can even extend its arm toward Dean.

"Come on, we gotta move." Sam hauls his brother up, liberating him from the jaws of the pit—distilled resurrection—and steadies him. They're nose to nose, and he sees it reflected in Dean's eyes. Behind him. Too close, too late.

An otherworldly force tugs him off his feet. A blurred, tumultuous mess of grass, dirt, and death, culminating in the side of his face meeting the hostile, shattering surface of a headstone. Hot, thick wetness slides down his temple, clouds of red dots in front of his vision. The world tilts. His hand clenches, but...his gun is gone. His left wrist is smashed between his torso and the ground.

Re-enactment, three dimensional and in color. Every time, same as the last time, same as the next time. They're puppets too brutal for their strings; this is their punishment.

Sam blinks away the disorientation, claws at reality. Distantly, he hears the shout of his name and the ricocheting boom of another gunshot.

Then another.

Then another.

Sam levers himself to his elbows. Something trickles into his eyes. As he struggles to pull himself vertical, his breath fogs and an icy arm materializes from the shadows. Cruel, strong, bony fingers wrap around his neck—the tightening of a gallow's rope. Sam wheezes, feet dangling, kicking, searching his jacket pockets for salt. A second arm shoots out, and sharp, lacerating nails dig into his side.

He abruptly thinks of the victims. Impersonal, nickel tables in the frigid dispassion of the morgue. Cadavers once ripped open, sewn shut by autopsy authority. Requisite wanton aftermath. A vile sort of vengeance, to do that to people. No dispute it would do that to him.

The distorted, wrathful features of Margaret Ann Bell bare down on him. She was happy once. In William's photos. Her grave was in William's photos too, in his last collection as an artist, posthumously released. He should have buried her—parrish records dictated that he'd buried her, and all the others, right before he'd snapped those photos, marched into the cemetery, and hung himself from the boughs of the live oak. Margaret Ann's remains should have been at the bottom of the grave Sam was excavating.

They weren't.

Why hadn't she been there?

Sam's fading. He attempts to lock on to something significant. A lifeline. A Hail Mary.

Her wrist—bleak and stark and hollow translucency.

He zeroes in. A sigil there, a symbol, outwardly carved into her being—phosphorescent and disturbingly perfect. Sam recognizes it. He's seen it before. Perhaps a hallucination. So much of everything before Hell is half-hallucination, like the memories belong to someone else.

"Sam!"

It's far away now.

Sleep is closer. Some kind of sleep.

* * *

"_Shhh."_

"_Sam."_

"_Listen."_

"_Sammy."_

"_Exactly."_

"Sam, Sammy! Come on, man."

Sam's dragged bodily by his ankles to the ravaged desolation of awareness, agonizingly fast, plunged into an overwhelming panoply of sensations. He can't identify any one of them; they're all tangled in a nest of past, present, future.

"That's it, hey, come on, wakey wakey." Coaxing, and oddly, simultaneously reprimanding. Lids heavy, as if glued tightly shut. Something solid presses against his side, and there's a congealed substance in weighty streaks on his face, down his nape. Familiar touches in his hair—a patchwork of matted tackiness. In the foreground, notes of constrained, commanding panic. "Sam!"

Sam rips his eyes open, face to face with his older brother—muddy, scraped, hints of desperation, having gone five rounds with a battering ram. The pain is swift, unforgiving. Sam groans, shudders, swallows acidic bile.

"Stop yelling," he mutters. Pennies, the tang pennies.

Dean's lips erupt into a relieved smile. The edges of his mask are wobbly, unsecured, billowing in the wind. Too open. Sam recognizes all the red flags immediately. A sharper clarity, in his grasp. He gathers sufficient clues, examines the evidence.

Parallel rows of bars at his back. Sam looks around, surveys. They're huddled in some semblance of cage.

"The aviary?" He croaks. Deduction, intact.

Dean taps the metal, "Iron. Tried to get out the front gate. No dice. This is the safest place I could find."

So much unspoken. Sam's been on that end of consciousness before. The only agenda is to do right by the other, despite the unpalatable dealt cards. Plenty of appropriate axioms. 'Path of least resistance'...no...'the road to Hell is paved with—'...no...'the lesser of two evils'. Yes. Or, the lesser of a whole bunch of evils. Endless supply, actually.

"Hey! Stay awake!"

He'd drifted. The force pressing on his side intensifies. Sam gasps, glances down. Dean's button-up is balled into a bundle, a triage quality bandage—flannel soaked through with crimson, beneath the fetters of his brother's pallid clasp. "Got me good." Fatalistic humor, bound and assured to go unappreciated. This is the song and dance.

Dean's nostrils flare, steel flint pupils. "Yeah, you could say that. What the hell is happening? Where the fuck are the bodies?"

"No bodies." Sam crushes the rear of his skull into the rods, scrambling for focalization and concentration, gathering the hurt into a bright ball he can master and banish.

"No shit, sherlock."

"Was wrong. Not a regular haunting. It's...a curse. An Atreus curse." He manages to string together the proper words, prays he sounds the slightest bit intelligible. Beyond his brother, their duffel lays discarded, torn half-open on the moss pillowed earth. No first-aid kit. Dean had evidently searched. They'd really played it fast and loose this time. Foolish. Rash.

"Hey, hey. Awake, remember? Atreus. Okay, keep talkin'." Dean's balancing, precarious, on the brink of babbling, manically switching gears and stages.

"Saw a sigil...on Margaret Ann's wrist. A witch must've gotten to the family. One of the Bells must've really ticked someone off. Probably William. It's dark crap, only been cast a handful of times. Never actually seen it before." Sam coughs, an erratic pounding, out of rhythm with his heart. His thoughts are neon splashes—brief, evanescent.

"What does it do? The curse?" Dean adjusts his grip, sneaking a disproving peek at the persistently seeping wound. He swears under his breath.

"It's from Ancient Greece. Atreus came from a long line of murderers and deceivers. It's about...the cycle of ancestral offense, through the killing of one's own kin. The whole family was marked with blood guilt, and in that time, blood had to atone for blood. So...the family line pretty effectively exterminated and sabotaged itself." A ripple of vertigo. Sam clamps his molars into his tongue, grounding himself. "Same thing, apparently, with the Bells. Curse made them all turn on each other, 'till William was the last one standing. So he killed himself."

"So it's a revenge curse?" Dean's contempt is boiling hot. They avoid witches at all costs. Worse when it's unplanned. Dean agreed to ghosts. Run of the mill, '_burn the bones, off the baddie'_ ghosts. His tolerance for surprises is short fused.

"No...it's about...intergenerational responsibility."

Dean sneers, gruff, "What a bunch of sophisticated, finger pointing bullshit."

"I don't know if it's that simple." Sam tries to shift, move. Dean holds him firm—a pillar of perpetual fortitude.

"Well, I do. Cause and effect. Simple as it gets." Dean, 'should be', and that's final.

"More like...symbiosis." Putty, he's slipping. This is no situation for this debate, for this argument. Sam's asking for it, and he doesn't ask for things.

"Oooh, college boy with the big words." Years, lifetimes, and a little bit of blood is all it takes for old scars to be exploited. Winchester activation energy. Ropes of tissue tying him to the tracks.

"I mean it, Dean. It's not cause and effect. It's literally a combination of circumstances into a new thing. So don't try and tell me it's simple, or straightforward. 'Cause it's not."

Silence. But for the rattle of Sam's lungs. A fresh concern, in his brother. "We still talking about the case?"

"Yeah. What else?" Sam avoids eye contact. Easy, given the spinning, cartwheeling environment.

"Seem to know a lot about this curse, is all."

"Did some research. Awhile ago. After...Lucifer." Sam's not sure where that came from. He hadn't intended to volunteer that information in the least, yet it had spewed out of him like a fountain, uninhibited, as if it had always been his objective. Concussion. Robbing him of his faculties.

"Hey! None of that, stay with me. Sam!"

Sam stifles a moan, swats at Dean's probing, solicitous tap. "M'here."

"Let's skip all the lectures, all right, professor? What about now, with the Bells? Shouldn't it be over? They're all dead."

Sam shakes his head, Dean's fingers curled into the hem of his shirt, pinning him. "Doesn't matter. When the curse killed them, it disintegrated their remains. But it's still keeping them here. Like...an anchor. Like any other thing a spirit will latch onto."

Dean sits on his heels, crouched, the dots blatantly connecting. "Which is why there's no report of them actually finding William's body."

"Right...I should've known." Never assume. John taught them that. John hammered that into their veins. They historically pay for these types of predicaments in gore.

"How do we break it?"

"The witch would've had to use a tree, to cast the spell. It'll have the same sigil as Margaret carved into the trunk somewhere."

Dean, acute, harmonized solidarity—an infallible extension of Sam. "We gotta burn it?"

"Yeah."

Dean blows out a puff of frustration. Sam notices his brother's thumb contract in the grooves of his collarbone, as if only he could delve beneath Sam's skin, he could fix all their problems. "_Great_. This dump is practically a tree farm. That's it? Any tree? Nothing specific?"

Sam ventures an additional shake of his head, but the dizziness prevails and cripples the action. Both of Dean's hands transfer to Sam's bleeding torso—harder, a begging variety of action, a plea for _staunching_. "Fuck this. We're getting out of here."

"You tried. You know they won't let us leave."

"Fine," Dean spits, "I'll set fire to every _goddamn tree_ on the _goddamn property_."

Sam rolls his eyes to the best of his ability, "Dean…"

"You gotta better idea? Or you wanna keep bleeding out?"

"Just shut up and let me think a little, okay?"

They glare at one another. A clock ticks somewhere. Sam deliriously pictures it inside Dean's brain, woven into his cerebral cortex. A countdown, to worst case scenario. Minutes. Silence.

Pressure.

Sam regards the open bag. "William's photos. Need to look at them."

Better, not a question. Not an ask.

Sam doesn't ask for things.

Dean is demonstrably loath to move one iota from his position. The anger and fear rolls off him in tidal waves. In a flash, the tiny pile of black and white images are dropped into Sam's lap, decorated with scattered blotches of scarlet. He picks them up, quelling his trembles, as if to spare his brother. Doubtful anything has been missed. Dean doesn't miss those caliber of things. Readily, steadily.

Each polaroid, a beautifully macabre depiction of the Bell family cemetery. More so, now learning William created it without any bodies—like a shrine, like a piece of art. A final act, a final wish, preceding his own demise.

"They're useless. Faked." Dean complains. His fists, white knuckles—his default, his factory setting. The last line of defense between Sam and mutating, viral endings.

Sam flips the photos over, reads what he's already read more than a dozen times over the past few days. William's restrained, delicate calligraphy: 'The Garden.'

It had been the title of the collection. Poetic—garden as cemetery. Classical in origin, to call it that. To designate a place, wherein the contemporary trend is for cessation, as an opportunity for beginning instead. Sam intimated as much out loud yesterday. Dean had whipped out a clever double entendre as a counter attack. Forgettable. The impression is faint, merely twenty four hours after the fact—stranded at the end of a very long tunnel, or the top of a well Sam has tumbled down.

"Maybe, maybe not," Sam murmurs.

* * *

_The knobs of Sam's vertebrae throb versus the rigid, lecture hall chair. He's forced to crimp himself like a suitcase in all of his classes. He'll spend four years like this, wreaking havoc on his spine. Seven years, barring he's accepted into law school. The stale taste of burnt espresso cakes his gums. He fled all the way to California, and sleep endures in its obstinance, forever an evasive foe. _

_Pressure._

_He broke up a bar fight last night before it even started. Brady gaped at him like he was an alien, crash landed from a different planet. Sam tried to laugh it off. Difficult to be convincing when every instinct was screaming at him to pick up a pool cue, to arm himself, to quit fraternizing with potential adversaries. Even more difficult to renegotiate the space he occupies in these well trodden places. Before, he was of the secluded gloom, the corners...now, he's expected to be of the light, seated front and center. Identity crisis, except much more fraught._

"_I think that's long enough. Let's hear it, what do you guys see?"_

_Sam forcibly extracts himself from his spiral. He focuses on the vast painting projected on the blackboard in front of him._

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter_, by __Johannes Vermeer__. His Art History professor, Mr. Rosen, paces. Plaid, slicked mane, navy chinos, the edges of a barely discernible rose tattoo—a mishmash of respectable academia and 'stick it to the man' grunge. He's the only one Sam's comfortable approaching during office hours. _

_Sam inspects the digital rendition of the painting, tries to formulate a worthy perspective. Dean pops up—unbidden, unsummoned. He squashes his older brother's voice down, exiled into the depths of his past, like cutting off an appendage. Tally marks. He wonders where his family is right now. _

_The class begins to chime in—a cacophony of eager, innocent suggestions. Mr. Rosen points, fluid, to each raised hand, offering nods and sustaining coy neutrality._

"_Peace."_

"_Serenity."_

"_Hope."_

"_Consolation."_

"_Silence."_

_Sam jolts—a palpable electrocution. Silence. A powerful word, that. More powerful than it ought to be. He scans, piqued interested, more invested, brow furrowed. Mr. Rosen hones in on his reaction, likely noticing the pained worry lines. Amber eyes narrow on Sam's hunched shoulders."What about you, Mr. Winchester? You agree?"_

_Sam chews on the inside of his cheek. There's graveyards worth of things to say, graveyards worth of things that apply, but he has never been called upon to articulate them. John has set traps like this for him before—bait and lures in his personal potter's field of recrimination and ruptured organs. _

_Skittish. Hesitation. "I guess. I think so. I mean, it looks like those things...peaceful. Silent. But…"_

_Patient, heartening. "Go on." _

_It unspools like the opening of a flood gate, like a mantra he chants over and over again, "I think it's easy to ascribe what we see to what someone else tells us it is."_

_Mr. Rosen leans on his skinny podium, half-turned towards the painting, a flicker of a 'please elaborate' gesture. "So what's bothering you about Vermeer?"_

_The other students aren't moving an inch. Here's the difference—the sheer interest, the sheer want of participation. This is probably the loudest Sam will ever reach. "Europe was war torn, right? He must've seen so much death...so much violence."_

_The professor smiles, swift, pleased. "Exactly."_

Dean, a worm in his ear, conspiratorial smirk, "Exactly."

_The older man rotates to the next slide on the projector, illuminating a zoomed in variation of the artwork. His intonation is smooth, soothing. "See, Vermeer's works are notoriously peaceful, notoriously consoling because of the pressure of violence. He painted peace and consolation as a kind of coping mechanism. He was in what can be described as a 'wordless dimension', with only his paintbrush to embody the strength and truth of a human sensation, forced to find a way to communicate outside of the means of language."_

_A 'wordless dimension'. _

_Sam's familiar. _

_It's silent there. _

_He studies the painting—the soft lined woman, the gradient glow of sunlight, the blue tinted shadows, the whisper suggestion of pregnancy, the hush of daybreak or dusk. He visualizes her husband, marching off to war, likely to never return, abandoning her to that silence._

_Sam thinks, abruptly, of instances of soldiers going insane listening for sounds of the enemy. Dean's told him those stories, John's told him those stories, Bobby...Jim...the heart of darkness. Sam envisions those soldiers, huddled together, being driven mad by the silence and hearing what they couldn't hear, creating a narrative for the negative space. Scary, for him to read so clearly a message he's already intimately acquainted with, already irrevocably intertwined with, on the canvas._

_The professor's cadence creeps back in, "The lack of violence in Vermeer's work is called 'conspicuous exclusion'. It makes the viewer attend to what is left out. Makes you notice everything a thing is not. The lack of war, the lack of death, the lack of brutality, is a felt absence, an insidious leech outside the frame. Artifacts that aren't visibly present, yet are 'present-as-missing'." _

_A beat. _

_Sam discerns the heat of Mr. Rosen's inquiring gaze before he mildly prompts, "Still think it looks easy, Mr Winchester?" Not a challenge, not like John. Kind, genuine. Very new. He'll require rehearsal to reply—Dean's sardonic quips in his mouth, bullets in the chamber, prepared for launch._

_Sam clutches the edges of his textbook, rooting for his shield, his suit of armor, grappling with these notions he's only ever sought to leave behind, and has never, not once, asked for. _

_Sam doesn't ask for things. _

"_Looks more like a war story...a true war story." _

_The professor is notably intrigued, perhaps unused to hairpin pivots. His index finger taps the concave dimple of his chin,"Interesting, and arguably valid. So...what's the moral of a war story?" _

_Sam thinks about pressure. He thinks about silence, those soldiers, and even Vermeer, underneath the pressure of all that violence—remembered, imagined, foreseen. Like molded clay sycophants, strung out, preserved, connecting salvation and insanity. _

_Moral. _

_What's the moral?_

"_Well, Sam, what's the moral?" _

_He opens his mouth, and wants to say, 'It's creating, it's living, not in place of, but in spite of.'_

_Yet, his calloused fingers remember the steel, implacable lines of a twelve gauge trigger guard, kissed by January dawn, and what he really says is, "I don't know."_

* * *

Bitter, to scrape and peel and chip the black stain of retrospect.

"I know where the tree is." Sam hitches. He unfurls his legs, preparing, mustering mental durability.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow your roll. Wanna share with the class first?"

Dean, a vital gambler, yet a line in the sand concerning Sam—a circle surrounding him to detach him from all of Dean's worst impulses.

"William's letter said he was going to hang himself from the oak in the garden. We thought he meant the cemetery, 'cause of the photos. I think he meant their actual garden. The one Margaret Ann planted in the center of the labyrinth."

The waxing gibbous steeps the spindly hedges in a temporary gray shroud, diffusing layers of inky contours. Sam squints—the yawning entry caves inward, as if unhinged, gnarled.

Dean deliberately blocks his view, discards the photos, vanquished to the duffel in a mixture of exasperation and disgust. "Okay, well nice theory, but how do we know that's the same tree with the sigil?"

"We don't. It's just...a feeling." Sam shrugs, hovering over Dean's makeshift dressing. His brother possesses no desire to relinquish the reins.

"Wow. I'm sold."

"Just trust me on this." The gauntlet, audibly slicing into the grooves of a chopping block. Agree, or disagree, but the irregularity of catastrophe has only ever been kept at bay by their trust. It's programmed into them—an innate epidemic of sharedness.

"Fine, you stay here, I'll check it out." Dean stands, reluctant, and retrieves his sawed-off. His brother cracks open the barrel, loads salt pellets, skillfully nimble. To Sam, the paragon of safety.

He takes advantage of the lapse in scrutiny, squeezes the iron bars, and hauls himself upright. "I'm coming with."

Dean shutters, compressed, nonetheless rawly transparent. "My ass you are," he snarls.

"I'm not asking."

Sam doesn't ask for things.

"Good, me neither."

"You're not going out there without backup."

Dean scoffs. A volley, a game of wits. One side aggressively instigating an irrefutable allocation of roles, the other fiercely rejecting any breed of division. Sam surrenders the support of the aviary wall, as if to prove he's fighting fit. "Plus, you don't know the incantation. Without it, burning the tree is pointless."

Suspicious appraisal, "You didn't say anything about an incantation."

"Wasn't important yet." John taught Dean how to lie. Dean taught Sam how to lie.

"And I take it you're not just going to tell me, are you?" His brother oozes reticent defeat.

Sam quirks a half-smile, sews his victory flag. "We're wasting time. Give me my gun."

* * *

"Wish we had some thread." Sam mutters. Their boots sink into the marshy mud, prickly shrubs snagging in their clothes. He shivers, wracked with pulsating pain, and presses his palm to the drenched flannel—copper in the atmosphere. Dean halts in front of him, navigating, weapon at the ready, glancing left and right before throwing Sam a dose of pointed skepticism.

"You know, like Ariadne," he expounds.

"Sure, Sammy, great movie. Not sure how that's helpful right now." Dismissive. Inferred delirium.

"M'not talking about _Inception._ I'm talking about...Dean, down!" His brother hits the deck without an inch of vacillation, just in time for Sam to once more shoot an emerging member of the Bell family. Smaller, one of the children.

"Behind you!"

He's fast enough this time. Margaret Ann shrieks, dissipating into a chalky, white cloud. The sound thrums in Sam's ears, rebounds tenfold. He stumbles, joints failing to lock. Dean catches him, stabilizes him, and tugs him onward. "How are they recovering so fast?" Unnerved—minute, yet apparent solely to Sam.

"S' the curse." Unable to prevent the slur.

"I told you, you should've stayed behind," his brother grumbles. They round the adjacent bend, but it's a dead end. "Son of a bitch!" Dean pivots, steering Sam, and they backtrack a couple of meters in order to choose an alternate route. "I hate mazes."

"It's a labyrinth," Sam corrects.

"Same thing."

"Not exactly."

"Well then I hate those too," Dean barks

A firm hand on Sam's sternum, the retort of another shot. Dean lowers his gun, and unexpectedly smirks. "Yahtzee."

Sam wedges himself betwixt his brother's elbow and the domineering undergrowth, peering ahead.

The Bell garden was considered a feat of utter sublimity by the upper echelons of the aristocracy. Cultivated in the center of the labyrinth, politicians once networked here, over tea and elite, casual debauchery. Raving ones. Apt.

It's hollow now...desiccated. Brown, decomposed, and miserable. In the center, a sprawling live oak—a primordial figure, a sentry of the narrow gate.

Dean kicks obstruction from their path, one eye seemingly chained to Sam, and takes point. He was born there, too. They stalk the trunk, swinging the beam of their flashlights, hunting for the telltale Atreus sigil.

Eight feet up on the West facade, Sam finds it. "Dean," he croaks.

His brother advances, hopping over the colossal, contorted roots. "This the part where you say 'I told you so'? "

"Let's just torch it so we can get outta here."

"Amen." Dean extracts the bottle of lighter fluid from his inner pocket and pops open the cap.

Their breath fogs.

Sam raises his sawed-off.

It's wrenched away, consumed by the night.

"Look out!"

Dean's reaction time is spot on, but Sam can't appreciate it, because something sweeps him off his feet, drags him. His nails tear at the mounds of debris, clambering for recourse.

"Sammy!"

His back collides, explodes, with an uncompromising, ruinous entity. Sam sucks in oxygen, chokes—an aborted sequence.

William Bell leans over him. The specter glitches, in and out, electric and uncannily sentient. "Burn the tree!" Sam shouts, praying Dean is having more luck than he at the moment.

William strikes, Sam tries to roll away, but his body won't cooperate. Again, he finds himself with an icy, leathery clutch around his throat, and a wrist glowing with an ancient, cursed symbol under the tip of his nose. Sam sputters, struggles.

Black spots leech at the edges of his vision.

Bruises.

Bruises encircling William's neck.

"We're trying to help you." Sam gasps. The man meets his gaze—a bottomless trench into the bowels of damnation. A spark, though. Of who he once was, albeit tortured. Sam's positive. "We can break it...set all of you free."

Silence.

Proverbial silence.

Osmosis linking the carnal domain and the mystic domain.

Suddenly, William lets go and Sam's released, plummeting to the dirt—ribs jarred, renewed blood warm on his abdomen.

The Bell patriarch watches him, sadly. Then veers to survey his brother, just as Dean drops his zippo and flames ignite into radiant, blazing grandeur.

Sam's paralyzed, mesmerized, as William shimmers. Beyond them, floating on the fringes of the deteriorated garden, seven luminiferous profiles follow suit. Margaret Ann, growing mistier, growing softer.

The live oak succumbs.

The Bell family winks out of existence in a thunderous, deafening clap.

"Sam!"

Dean's there, shaking him, tethering him. Sam's adrift. Rest has never been more appealing. "Hey! Stay awake! I need the incantation."

"Wha...?" Sam mumbles, threadbare consciousness. A slap. Sam flinches, sobered.

"The incantation, what is it? Now!" Dictator timbre; pavlovian to submit to such an order.

"No incantation."

"**What?"**

"Lied. Burning's enough." Sam groans as he sits up, batting Dean's poking limb away. His brother flounders, mouth opening, then closing, then opening.

"You...son of a...you _played me_?"

"Kinda. You fell for it. Also...I told you so." Dean blanches, Sam chuckles.

His brother's lips disappear into a thin line. "Shut up."

Sam smiles. Dean shakes his head grumpily, disapprovingly. The fever of the fire licks the air. Sam bites his tongue as Dean examines the tourniquet, legibly perturbed. "Fuckin' witches, man. And William. What the hell? I don't get it. Why dig his own grave? Why make a whole cemetery for nothin'? His photos? What's the point?"

Sam shudders, observing his brother's ministrations with the apathy of someone whose been taken apart (slowly, quickly) and cobbled together too many times to count. He wonders if the tactile facets of healing will ever be restored, or if this vague, nebulous dissociation is simply in his marrow. "I dunno, makes sense, I guess. I get it."

"Dude, this wannabe artist almost got us both killed." Discord, between the touch and the words.

"No, the curse almost got us both killed. He's just as much a victim as us."

Silence.

Pressure.

Dean's brow is furrowed, pinched, frowning. He doesn't admit to anything. He'll never admit to anything. He's exacting, he's a shot glass, he's underneath a microscope that will never diagnose him. 'Should be', and that's final.

Sam sighs. "I get why he did it. To make it look the way it felt."

His brother jeers—caustic, derisive. He's pent up, spewing out the wrong way. "Riiight. Except that's not how any of this actually works."

"For us, maybe," Sam whispers

"_Sam_." Whetted, a verbal razor.

"What?"

"You gonna hurl? How many fingers?" Three. Then two. Then four. Then one—the bird.

Sam scowls. "Cut it out, I'm fine."

Dean rolls his eyes, "Clearly. Let's just get outta here. Moral of the story? No more witches, or witch curses, or whatever the hell. I mean it this time."

"_Well, Sam, what's the moral?"_

Sam's quavering by the time they trudge back to the Impala. Smoke wafts, embers flutter, and the putrid stench of expiration permeates. They're smothered in ash, muck, salt, ichor. They're inverted.

They're insides, on their outsides.

Dean drapes his coat over Sam's shoulders, gently helps maneuver him into the passenger seat, his frayed veil of '_everything is under control, even though it's really a shitshow'_ firmly lodged in place. No more surface area for tally marks. Dean, embedded in Sam, and vice versa. Always giving. Always giving like it's expectation. Always taking up the mantle of every half-formed need, or want, or worry Sam has ever even thought about.

Sam didn't ask.

Sam doesn't ask for things.

Never has to.

* * *

One thousand miles, 16 sutures, and 78 hours later, Sam organizes William's photos in a case file for the archives. The stitches pull at his side—an echo of an ache, the fingerprints of trauma—and there's a taut stretch of swollen, yellowing, livid contusions on his temple and cheekbone. This is sameness, and honesty.

Their bodies have always been crime scenes.

He hasn't looked much in the mirror since the plantation. Every time he catches Dean's hawk-like stare (the unabashed and unrepentant surveillance), his brother's facial expression is more than enough to indicate the overall state of affairs. They're tuned in to an extreme frequency, where experience is absolute and often condemning.

In the sickly overhead tungsten, Sam runs his fingers over the dead photographer's images, feasibly the only evidence independent of the Winchester's memory of the man's ill-fated legacy. There's a separation, there, in the creases of the resin. Between what was felt and what was known to be concrete. An act of '_not in place of, but in spite of'_. A refined jewel of the difference between implicit and enacted.

Or, plausibly, the nomination of a nameless, newly born thing—subtle compared to what they normally deal with, yet accurate. Almost as accurate as the slippery nature of historical relevance. Sam's accustomed to the painful enlightenment of retroactive knowledge. Perceiving one thing, learning facts attributed to it, and then perceiving another upon closer inspection. Like lenses over the eyes, changing focus, refracting light. It's always an ineffable terror, to consider: has the essence of the thing changed, or has the knowledge of its history changed you?

It's the penultimate of time and immortality, these photographs. William—crushed beneath his familial burden and transgressions, the inevitable curse which had taken from him and would only take more—arranged the fractured pieces around himself, breathed out peace and consolation through the shutter of his camera.

An incarnation of Vermeer.

Sam will wither under the isolated weight of that, forever. There's always one more layer to scrape off, one more skeleton to dig up. They bury themselves, he and Dean, deeper and deeper. Every box in the archives contains the catalogued items, and also every single second of blood, torment, and death that forged the item. That's the strain of knowledge one cannot come return from, from which there is no recovery. Sam invites it inside because if he doesn't, no one else will. If he doesn't, then the pressure will have won.

Pressure.

The Winchesters don't necessitate a curse to establish their own undoing—it's threaded into their DNA. They rush to it, welcome it like it's their rapturous providence. It's a fiendish depravity, to inflict the worst and convince the inflicted it's who they've always been. He understands that now. He's accepted it, for the both of them.

Sam turns off the buzzing bulbs, softly clicks the door shut, and pads quietly back to his room. He pauses at Dean's threshold, listens to the muffles of sleep, hears the snarls of hellhounds. He sits atop his mattress, listens to the hum of electricity, hears the devil's laughter.

When he wakes up from nightmares of eternal silence, he'll imagine that wintery morning in the woods—hideous cold, Dean a warm presence at his shoulder. And it will be so vividly strange, so viscerally temporal, that Sam will feel he's been permitted a brief trespass into something he concluded was lost—the moment before something is taken from him in the guise of giving. He'll want to ask his brother to say it differently this time, to absolve him of his tally marks, to tell Sam if he only listens hard enough, he'll hear every single step of the approaching deer, that it's not about anticipation, it's not about vigilance, it's not about the silence, it's not about sacrificing his idea of safety and embracing the idea of constant, unrelenting danger.

But Dean would never be that irresponsible. Sam will never be as free as Vermeer or William either, who could conceive and assert a concept as abstract as peace or consolation so tangibly.

So he never asks the imagined Dean, just as he never asked the real Dean the first time, because he stopped asking for things, because he doesn't ask for things, and somewhere along the way Sam's forgotten if it's because he doesn't deserve the things he wants to ask for, or if the things he wants to ask for are merely outside the realm of possibility.

His brother still says, "_Exactly." _Like a secret, like an invocation. Sam still shoots the deer, like he's committed a sin, like his unbearably young hands have betrayed him. They still stand over the corpse, the carcass of an animal that never made a sound—devoid of meaning, laid out as a lesson. Dean is so proud, was so proud. It was a gift, Dean believed it was a gift, Dean believed Sam should believe it was a gift.

But what Dean doesn't know is that Sam hadn't slept a wink that night. For the majority of nights after. He also doesn't know that Sam supposed it was fitting, really, when the visions started, because it was Dean who taught him to see the future to begin with, to rewire his brain into the assumption of tragedy, to trust not because of decency, but because of the guarantee of treachery.

Years later now, and Sam's that same twelve year old, wide awake, stripped bare, thoughts too agile—an invisible pressure descending on him, a harbinger for who Sam is, who he'll be, and who he'll never be again. Perched on his chest, coiling him into a dead sort of vessel imprisoned within the white hot intensity of a battle weary mind frame. He's personified surrender on his bed, like laterally induced innocence.

With him now, the pressure of all that violence—perhaps his oldest friend.

There's your moral.

**END**


End file.
